Daven Sanassy

I wrote a bit of an overview of how we animate our Citadel band ("The Wingnuts") using 'silent MIDI' tracks, as well as some of the reasoning behind having them in Badlands Crew. Read more, and see them in action here: https://lnkd.in/eSKcXspE

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If you didn't have to write tests would you? If you could point a smart AI (some future very capable one) bot at your code project and it would write test to cover it? That's a pretty interesting question to me. Do want to spend time writing tests to validate that my code works? Sort of no. Assuming a capable AI bot that could do it. Do I want to spend time writing tests? No...but I use TDD not just to write tests but as a essential part of my programming workflow now. The artifact of unit tests is almost a very valuable fringe benefit. TDD is the Yang to my Evil Programmer Monkey Brain (EPMB) Yin. TDD keeps my EPMB in check. It is the good voice whispering in my ear about design. Things like; "What's the simplest thing that you could do first?", "Is that really the simplest thing?", or "Hey, pause and reflect after writing that line of code and maybe refactor." TDD inserts a natural cadence and flow to my writing code. That cadence has breaks/pauses that keeps me from just layering EPMB code on top of EPMB. I helps me to break the "sunk cost fallacy" with those breaks (I'm much more likely to delete 1 line of code I spent 10 seconds on vs. 10-40 lines of code I've spent an hour on). When I'm writing the test, because the cadence and process is muscle memory/mastered, I'm actually not thinking about writing the test, I'm thinking meta and in a different headspace leveraging automaticity. It's like showering and washing my hair. When you are showering and washing your hair, you aren't focusing 100% on everything, you are on auto-pilot. That's why so many people have epiphanies when doing wrote tasks like showering. I get focused epiphanies on my coding task while I'm writing the test. TDD ensures that the code that I write is testable and almost SOLID out of the box. Because I offload my code validation to the tests in my process, I can go days without using the console or debugger. My tests give me that, out of the box. I'm sure there will be coders reading this that are thinking something like, "I get all that stuff w/o TDD, you're just not as good as me." Sure that's possible. How do you describe the benefits of caffeine in the morning to someone who's never experienced it before and their life is just fine without it? They wake up and function without it just fine in the morning. Except they could have caffeine! (this is just an example...for the record I don't do caffeine anymore either) So if there was a capable AI bot that could write all the tests for my project. I'd probably use it as a starting point for a legacy project that I was digging into. For writing new code, TDD is so integral to my code writing process and has so many more benefits than just the test artifact, I'd keep doing it.

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I wasn’t lying … we only know what we know I posted last week about a UK job ad for a senior dev £175/day The comments section got emotive. A couple of people questioned if the rate was real I’ve since had three devs say they’d been approached with offers of £150/day, one of those Inside IR35 This illustrates crucial issues we need to solve: Transparency of rates The gender pay gap The ethnicity pay gap The disability pay gap Paying people & ‘service providers’ fair rates for their skills (& location) I speak to a lot of people in tech every week, from all over the world, across various industries - candidates, recruiters & clients I scale teams for my clients & build my own teams too, so have a far better grasp than most on the ever changing tech jobs market & rates I’ve made it my side job (unpaid) for decades, to provide transparency for those that aren’t in a place of privilege, to know true market rates for similar roles WHY? TRANSPARENCY IS EVERYTHING KNOWLEDGE IS POWER Secrecy is what the powerful use to subjugate Whether that’s in a market where clients hold the power (like now) Or in a ‘candidate market’ & you are: A woman From any racial, ethnic marginalised group Disabled ND Or not ‘well connected’ Imagine having access to data maps that tell you how much people are being paid for similar roles right now / for a given past period? Being able to see what ‘demographics’ are paid most? Having whole market, live data to inform what your day rate/salary, what to accept or decline? Imagine closing the gender / ethnicity pay gap more quickly than sas recently quoted by the likes of Deloitte, BCG, McK etc where it says it'll take 50-120 years 91.1% of tech companies pay their male employees more than female employees The worst of those surveyed admitted paying women 58.7% less than men Obviously the data won’t give you distinguishable info (names of people / orgs - GDPR) but shows you where you sit in the whole given market eg As a Java developer, you could find out: - How many Java contracts are currently on the platform? - What’s the average day rate? - What demographics achieve the top / bottom / median rates? - Filter by location, gender, ethnicity / other demographic data & see data patterns - Be informed to modify your approach accordingly On the flip side it helps organisations stay honest If you post a role at £175/day & see the whole market is paying 2-3x that, you’ll see you need to stop taking the p*ss Most people, especially those from marginalised groups, do not know what the average rate is, so find themselves guessing their ‘market worth’ & inadvertently ‘low-balling’ themselves through lack of knowledge / real market data Imagine a world where we all have access to the same knowledge & data insights? And what the impact would be for equality We’re working on this! Watch this space BE MORE HUMAN #Recruitment #TechRecruitment #EthicalRecruitment #TechForGood #Contractors #Tech #BeMoreHuman

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Why is it important to understand games? Because they explain how a party turns 35% of the vote in an election into over 400 seats in Parliament. Labour’s win in the UK general election is many things. A sign that voters could not do anything other than boot out a tired and incompetent Conservative Party; a relatively unenthusiastic trade off of steady competence over wider vision; a least worst option that has opened the doors to smaller parties. It’s also a victory for ruthless campaigning. It’s an operational masterclass in which financial and personal resource was directed with strategic precision to get as many Labour MPs over the top as possible. And it is derived from a fundamental truth: elections are games with clear rules. Labour’s strategy - and, to be fair, The Liberal Democrat’s approach - rejected the idealism of “the best vision wins out” to say “how do we win this game within the set rules” to avoid another 2019 style disappointment. It’s an approach that is central to great campaigning. It is also, as Kelly Clancy posits indirectly in her great book Playing With Reality, a perfect example of minmaxing a game: controlling and risking as little as possible from your side while maximising opportunities within the rules (and errors from your opponents). Clancy argues that our failure to understand play and to take it seriously within society means we can’t understand fully the social, cultural and biological drivers that lead us to create the rules based systems that we play within. Elections are therefore one of those rare times where the dynamic of play is surfaced in a way that we can truly see, that we can understand explicitly and that we can talk about easily - demonstrating its immense value in a way little else can. P.S. If you like reading about the surprising ways games reshape society, think about subscribing to my newsletter Video Games Industry Memo. There will be plenty more where this has come from in the year ahead.

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Well, a bit of a bust in the audio visualisation dept. tonight. After doing a fair bit of googling, several people have been asking the same thing (Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc). My initial approach was to feed an audio file to the MediaSource API and load it into a buffer which could be read by the WebAudio API. That didn't work. Next I tried a, well, basically the file reader, which would again, take the file and do the same as above. Then... I was like, wait, can I just get the audio output from the speakers? No. There were workarounds I saw but they used the mic input. Aaannd, as I was typing this I just Googled to see what libraries are out there to handle this with JS. I've found one that I'm going to dig into the repo of and do some more tinkering. Kind of a wandering post, but oh well. Basically I took a bunch of wrong turns tonight and by the looks of this other project, I'll end up not to far from where I started with the Media source API a couple of hours ago. #webaudio #frontenddevelopment #javascript #tinkering

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I'm working on the audiobook version of The Software Engineer's Guidebook - and it will be out early December. What platform would you be interested in listening on? I'm asking this question, as it turns out that Audible has a seemingly monoplistic pricing structure, designed to discourage releasing audibooks anywhere outside of Audible. For audiobooks that agree to be exclusive to Audible: Amazon keeps 60% of sales, and the publisher is paid 40%. So a $10 audiobook nets $4 for the publisher. For audiobooks that are sold outside of Audible: Amazon keeps 75% of sales, and the publisher gets 25%. So a $10 audiobook nets $2.50 for the publisher. It's amusing that means that Amazon makes more on every audiobook sold (60-75% of the price) versus physical books sold (40% of the price). I'll be aiming to optimize for reach of distribution over revenue with this book, so interested to hear what platform(s) you prefer to listen to audiobooks. Please leave a comment, or fill out this form:https://lnkd.in/ecB4BD-n (when filling out the form, you can be notified when the audibook is out) And here's me listening to the recording, while reading along in the book, checking for correctness and ensuring the audiobook comes out as smooth.

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Two weeks ago, I attended Interactive Futures, a computer games outreach event held in Leamington Spa, UK. It changed the way I use AI in my workflow. Despite spending over 20 years in the industry, five of them locally, this was my first time at the event. I’m glad I went and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were several highlights worth mentioning: * A great introduction to the vibrant games community around Leamington Spa and the West Midlands. * Opportunities for real, practical conversations with games industry professionals. * Engaging panel talks on industry hot topics. Of these, the panel talks stayed with me the most. I was particularly interested in the discussions on the future of games, especially the role that AI will play (many thanks to Clare Green, Laura Steel, 🕹️Csaba Berenyi, James Norris, Hernan Polloni) Over the years, I’ve attended many talks on AI and have a reasonable understanding of the subject. However, one comment seemed to challenge me directly: how much have I integrated AI into my workflow? The truth was, I hadn't—at least not to the extent I could. I knew of tools, the usual suspects, but they weren’t genuinely part of my workflow habits. Not as much as they might be. Since then, I've started to recognise and integrate the practical power of current generative AI tools, which feels like the sweet spot for my personal use. I’m now incorporating AI more into my daily routine—as a sounding board, a visualiser, a time-saver, and a productivity booster. This shift has led me to rethink how I view AI right now, even if my grander hopes for the possibilities remain. Initially, I saw AI as a grand intellectual game-changer, something that would mark a paradigm shift in how we perform jobs, but essentially unfinished and kept at arm's length. It might still be that huge leap in the future, but for now, for me, it’s more of a practical tool that I can weave into my approach rather than something that completely transforms the game. From a workflow perspective, it’s less like moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional chess, and more like the introduction of metal rackets in tennis, DRS in Formula One, or VAR in football. The game remains fundamentally the same but, to play it well, you need to understand the changes, even if they aren’t immediately apparent on the surface. Because before the huge change, as is common, there will be a number of incremental changes for those who are looking. My goal now is to ensure I’m really looking. If you are interested in further insights into AI’s impact on tools, as well as the possibilities in the future, I'll include some links in the comments.

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Want to watch me build an app in 30 minutes at SXSW London? 👀 Only joking… sort of. The way we code and build apps is changing FAST, and I think its super important that engineers are keeping up with the most up to date workflows and tools. Tools like Copilot and Cursor are making development faster, smarter, and more accessible than ever. At SXSW London, I want to show you how to harness these tools for your own projects. My hands-on talk will explore the AI transforming app development and what it means for the future of our industry. But I need your vote to make it happen. ➡️ Sign up for a SXSW voting account and hit the heart on my session page here: https://lnkd.in/eRmSSUnu

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The amazingly simple act of delaying naming things in code saves me so much time, effort and produces fabulous results. It's so counter intuitive that something so simple can produce something so surprising. Rules to use this: 1. Get good at the renaming keyboard shortcut, you're going to use it a lot. 2. Get a good simple nonsense naming strategy (e.g. applesauce, blah, pants) 3. If you are spending more than 15-20 seconds on coming up with a name, use a nonsense name (pants, shirt, sock, shoe...) Obviously simple names like "firstName" in the example go ahead and use, if there's a better one later, rename it. Key is don't stress your brain and be quick. Example: You need to create a method that combines first name and last name to return full name. Process (non-tdd): 1. Create a class "Pants". 2. Create a method "shirt" that takes two strings "firstName" and "lastName" and returns a string. 3. Write your logic and return. 4. Now that you are done ask yourself or partner/mob(you get 30 seconds to come up with the best name), "what's is the job of this method?" -> FullNameGenerator. Good enough...rename. Ask yourself, is this good enough or do I need to do more? If yes, give yourself another 30 seconds, if not, go to the class name. 5. What's a good name for the class? (again 30 seconds or less) FirstNameLastNameAggregator? Good enough? Rename. 6. Good enough? Done. Process w/TDD: 1. Create test class PantsTest and method ShouldShirtTest(). 2. Create "Pants pants = new Pants();" 3. create "String actual = pants.shirt(firstName, lastName);" 4. Similar process as above, but I'm now using my IDE to generate/drive the implementation of Pants.shirt(). 5. Run observe failure and fix with simplest possible. 6. Lather/Rinse/Repeat renaming exercise (30 seconds or less, what's a better name for this? rename). 7. Rename method, rename class, rename test variable, rename test method, rename test class. Some of these steps will be done by your IDE. This method, although seems like a lot of work, isn't that much work because I'd frequently rename all the things above...or should have renamed them. I hate doing extra work and find that this optimization saves me time and results in well named code. It also doesn't break my coding flow. What's a good name for this method doing a complex thing? (ponder, tick-tock, 10 seconds) It could be X, Y, Z, XY, YZ, ZX (ding, Slack message...shiny thing...2 minutes later after reading slack). What about XYZ, or ZXY (Slack reply...2 minutes...oh and I ping Paige Watson...6 minutes later). I'm sure everyone knows the drill. Effective naming is one of the hardest things we do as developers. Get good at "good enough" and "emergent". It will save you time and make your code look awesome.

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It's nice to just do some simple work for a change. I needed an AVL tree for the C parser library I'm writing. The wrinkle is that it needs to be written with the experimental idiomatic style I'm developing, so that I can later import it into my homomorphic abstract machine to prove it equivalent to a constructively proven implementation that I'll create in the future. So, I derived an implementation from basic principles: height, balance factor, and rotations. No need to look at reference materials, source code, Stack Overflow, or some LLM. I just drew some diagrams on a white board, thought through the various cases and sub-tree patterns, and worked out some proofs on the whiteboard to show that I can apply rotations to maintain the balance factor invariants I defined. That's the sort of thing that got me interested in programming as a child and computer science in general as I got older. There is a certain sense of satisfaction that comes from this sort of pure software development that keeps me going, even after all of these years.

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It's 1st December already, which means it's "Advent Of Code" time again (https://lnkd.in/ebrUApNx). I've been taking part since 2021, and whilst I've had greater success some years than others, I've always really enjoyed doing it. Sometimes, day-to-day coding at work can end up being a bit of a repeat of using the existing components to do something or just modifying existing code to add some functionality. It's good to have the opportunity to start with a blank sheet of paper (or an empty file in an IDE) and try to solve a completely new puzzle from scratch. The puzzles are also sized quite nicely, so it's not too arduous if, after solving the puzzle the first time around, you want to go back and try again. It can also be a good way to learn a new language. In 2022, it coincided with me having just been made redundant - as well as being a great distraction from that, some of the jobs I was interviewing for may have needed Python, so I was solving the puzzle first in Typescript/node, then trying to write the same solution in Python. Anyway, I'm a big fan and I definitely recommend giving it a go!

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More terrible news today with Payload Studios announcing that they had to make reductions in staff due to the economic climate. You can find the full detail, as well as references for those affected, here: https://lnkd.in/eyKhTqEZ Those of you who are affected by this, please make use of my resources below: 🥇First, reach out to us at People Can Fly Studio, we have many roles open right now in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Europe, please check them out here: https://lnkd.in/eWpV5PbA 🥈Next, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past months I have created 9 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines, and I would urge you to check them out, if anything just to see what would be available to you: https://lnkd.in/e2qSeKk6 You can find over 5,600 jobs there. 🥉 Third, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ I urge you to check out the areas in particular about CV support and mentoring, as these will help you no matter what industry you are hailing from or are looking into going next. 🎖 Finally, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #payloadstudios #layoffs

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Bit of fun (still rough). Adding Automatic translation for Markdown files with http://ASP.NET Core & EasyNMT. EasyNMT isn't the MOST stable thing so it's still a bit fiddly to get working but got a bunch working already. See https://lnkd.in/embPqqpB Or in French :) https://lnkd.in/eFjb2PgZ Will update it later (spent all night on this so a bit spent :)) #EasyNMT #aspnetcore #markdown

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So the last 2 weeks on BBBA have been pretty productive. In the last video I posted, everything was pretty much just layout for how I wanted things to go and where things were supposed to live. Technically though, everything was done by pasting tiles onto a tilemap one by one, by hand; either flat on the background or at a level in front of BB. I knew this had to change at some point so I've now tackled it with support for proper sprite sorting that allows all sorts of things to be handled and ordered correctly and most importantly, automatically. Also problematic was my own workflow for creating the map areas. The same way that the rest of the map was created, buildings on the map were made in the same way, only more painfully produced and with a lot less flexibility. I've now created proper building support within the project so that I can just place buildings on the map and set a bunch of parameters like how many windows and doors, chimneys, dormer windows, porches, etc. This is making building emplacements much easier now and with the sprite sorting in place, they look really good and respond in a manner that's much better. Along with this I've created some colour set support so that I can define a grouped set of colours that can be set on buildings to give them all a standardised or area specific palette. Another thing I wanted to do was spend a bit of time bringing more life to the map. With that in mind, I've added in support to animate the trees generally and the bushes when BB runs through them. Once that was in, I added support for the NPCs and enemies so that they triggered the bushes and everything else too. I've also added in support for audio zones so that each area can have an ambient noise associated with it and I can set up extra areas with other sounds attached, for example when you get close to the lakes or river you get extra sploshy noises that fade in and out as you enter and exit the areas. With a mind to saving some CPU cycles I've also added support to the main areas of the game so that when you transfer from one major section to another, the one you leave gets disabled so that it's not all ticking over in the background while the player is off busy elsewhere. I've added a few more gameplay features that I'll take advantage of soon, such as containers that you can open and close and that can be set to spawn items on first open. Instead of just placing monsters on the map, I now place spawners that allow you to specify which monster type, the maximum number of monsters alive concurrently, how often they spawn and the radius of the spawn zone. Focus for the next 2 weeks is to tackle the outside dungeon areas so that I can add those back to the map easily using a similar system to my new dynamic houses and then I've got to approach the next big issue; building internals! Like everything else before, they are currently just pasted onto the map tiles by hand in the same, painful way as before. And that has to change!

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Taking a short break from Splats to explore Slats. So far most text or image to 3D generators have been underwhelming at best, but this one is pretty impressive. The demo only supports the Image-to-3D workflow, but I ran a few examples including the famous Stanford Bunny, and the results are 👍 https://lnkd.in/gwuH9ivX Paper 📄 https://lnkd.in/g_pK58iZ Code 💾 https://lnkd.in/g2wDtVs7 Demo 🤖 https://lnkd.in/g3wxSpkD

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Just trying out the newly released GOT (General OCR Theory) on Hugging Face Does anyone know any trick to improve the output quality? I just used the code on HuggingFace https://lnkd.in/eacHpGuX

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Developers: Why are you using an old laptop? I did the maths on my work laptop. It’s a reasonable spec, that I’ve had since 2022. M1 Pro, 16GB RAM / 512 SSD and is 2 years old. Buying new equivalent, M4 Pro 24GB RAM / 512GB SSD would cost around £2k. Currently you can get the same model on backmarket for just under £1k. That would mean the cost of replacing is £1000 over 2 years which works out £10 per week or £2 per day if you account for working days. My pre tax daily cost to the business is around £300 per day. Split that over 7.5 hours is £40 per hour. Or 75p per minute. I run my test suite multiple times a day and it can take maybe 5 minutes a run for the full suite. All I need to do is for my laptop to save me 3 minutes a day in run time, for it to cover the £2 per day it costs to upgrade. There's no environment impact if you sell your laptop on or feed it down the chain to someone who doesn't need the power. So the question is, apart from being attached to your laptop like some panini sticker album, why would you not upgrade? #prodeveloper

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Scottish games industry is shit. The government need to support businesses better. The attrition rate is so awful it needs to be addressed. Stable studios means stable job opportunities. We can’t tackle education before this otherwise there’s no jobs for graduates. Or worse, no support if they try start their own studios. Let’s stop putting the horse before the cart, it’s time to address the very real issues facing Scottish development studios. - lack of targeted financial support because we aren’t our own sector - lack of tax deductions and local council support. - acknowledgement of the business models employed by studios to survive.

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